Good boards ask good questions, and great boards ask great questions. The ability to ask meaningful questions is an important skill in the boardroom and fundamental to effective governance. Said the chairman of Bain & Company, Orit Gadiesh, in a 2009 Harvard Business Review interview, “The most distinguished board is useless and does a real disservice to the organization, in my view, if the people on it don’t ask the right questions. If you’re not asking questions, you’re not doing your job.”
For two decades I have taught 150- to 200-student sections of introductory financial management to majors in all business programs, plus business minors from diverse fields. Although the course has its fans—some even change their majors to finance each semester— many students find the material daunting, become distracted, and behave in ways that impede the learning of others along with their own. Distractions always have lurked in college classrooms; texters and Web surfers are merely the note passers and campus newspaper readers of the digital age.
How students respond to failure is a strong predictor of future success.
Emerging research suggests that for students to fare better, they need to fail better. How students respond to failure is a strong predictor of future success, and the notion of resilience is increasingly prevalent in conversations about higher education. Resilience has a number of characteristics, including levels of persistence, effort, positive mindset,
motivation and self-regulation.
So how do we build resilience into our classrooms? Are there ways to embed resilience into the content we deliver? As a literature professor, I have recently reimagined my medieval romance course as a learning journey about resilience. My premise: chivalric quests can provide a valuable lens to understand the process of transformative learning and provide us with models for normalizing failure as a necessary condition of success.
Until recently, the meaning and origin of the Canadian university degree was well understood by Canadians and around the world. Degrees were only offered by universities and the use of the label university was controlled by legislation in each of the ten provinces and three territories. Institutional membership in the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada signified that an institution was a university-level institution. However, the increased demand in the last two decades of the 20th century for access to university level degrees has resulted in the provincial-level approval of degrees that are offered in non-university settings. As a result of the increased proliferation of these non-university delivered degrees, the provincial level degree
accreditation processes and the university-level degree granting standards, as represented in the membership criteria for AUCC, are no longer aligned. In this paper, the author traces the changes in degree granting in Canada over the past 15 years or so. Current provincial policies and recent decisions regarding degree granting are outlined.
Background: Much research has sought to investigate emotions and forms of emotion management among teachers worldwide, including the connection between educational change and teacher emotion; the association between the culture of teaching and teachers’ emotional experience within parentteacher interactions; the link between teacher emotion and teacher beliefs; and the
expressions and sources of a wide variety of emotions in teaching.
This policy paper examines the various avenues in which entirely-online post-secondary learning, specifically entirely-online courses and programs, could develop in Ontario over the coming years.
Online education has the potential to make higher education more accessible, and it has the ability to overcome the financial, social and geographic barriers faced by some students via their pursuit of a post- secondary education. It also has the potential to enhance student learning, both inside the classroom and within distance education context. However, if implemented in the wrong way, it has the potential to be disengaging, impersonal, and costly. Broken down into sections based on OUSA’s mandate of seeking accessible, affordable, accountable, and quality post-secondary education for all willing students, this paper addresses some of the major concerns that surround fully-online learning, and provides possible solutions for these issues. There is currently a lot of potential for growth in this area, but a lot of questions remain as well. The following summary presents some of the topics discussed in this paper:
A seasoned educator shares four ideas for supporting students who have suffered emotional trauma.
This report explores undergraduate students’ involvement at The Ohio State University’s Columbus campus based on Student Life Survey data collected during Spring Semester 2016. The report focuses on differences between domestic and international students’ levels of engagement and belonging on campus. Specifically, this report examines students’ overall involvement in a range of co-curricular activities, their reasons for getting involved, their participation in different types of student organizations, their participation as student leaders and students’ sense of belonging at The Ohio State University.
When I teach workshops about designing the flipped classroom, I always encourage faculty to think carefully about the first five minutes of class. In my lesson plan template, one of the first tasks we discuss when planning in-class time is to prepare what I call a “focusing activity.” A focusing activity is designed to immediately focus students’ attention as soon as they walk in (or log in) to the classroom. When used in conjunction with flipped and active learning classroom models, focusing activities allow you to minimize distractions, maintain momentum between pre-class and in-class activities, and maximize the amount of class time you have to engage students in learning.
Just starting out? Worried about your lectures, your students, your time-management skills and more? Eight academics offer up their advice.
There are plenty of mistakes to go around early in one’s academic career. Whether they happen in front of a class or
behind the scenes, hindsight shows us how to do better. Here you’ll find a mix of experience and advice from eight
professors who’ve been there, done that and lived to share some lessons.
As a new semester approaches, and we put the finishing touches on our syllabi, the issue of how to motivate students is very much on faculty minds. Behind every assignment, reading, and in-class activity lurks the same question: Will they want to do this?
TORONTO -- It is "unacceptable" for publicly funded Ontario colleges to operate campuses outside Canada that exclude women, the premier of Ontario said Friday when asked about two men-only schools in Saudi Arabia.
As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge. For years inventions have extended man's physical powers rather than the powers of his mind. Trip hammers that multiply the fists, microscopes that sharpen the eye, and engines of destruction and detection are new results, but not the end results, of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages. The perfection of these pacific instruments should be the first objective of our scientists as they emerge from their war work. Like Emerson's famous address of 1837 on "The American Scholar," this paper by Dr. Bush calls for a new relationship between thinking man and
the sum of our knowledge. — THE EDITOR
OCUFA has presented timely and thoughtful policy positions throughout its existence on a broad range of postsecondary and related issues. Of the issues gaining prominence with government and policymakers in the past decade, how Ontario's public postsecondary institutions relate, co-operate, and collaborate to present the best possible pathways for students to their desired postsecondary outcomes has become increasingly important.
Mental health problems are on the rise among UK academics amid the pressures of greater job insecurity, constant demand for results and an increasingly marketised higher education system.
University counselling staff and workplace health experts have seen a steady increase in numbers seeking help for
mental health problems over the past decade, with research indicating nearly half of academics show symptoms of psychological distress.
The purpose of this qualitative case study was to gain insights into how aca-demics understand undergraduate graduand attributes. The findings reveal some alignment in views about student attributes, including that they are engaged citizens, are self-directed, have imagination, are questioning, are flexible, display leadership, are problem solvers, and possess character. This consistency, however, does not include the spectrum of views on how these attributes are conceived and developed. The findings reveal a range of inter-pretations regarding the kinds and levels of understandings of how graduand student attributes are developed throughout an undergraduate program of study. The findings indicate that (i) a shared understanding does not exist on how academics construe student attributes, (ii) academics do not share com-mon meanings about the core achievements of a higher education, or how these are developed through students’ undergraduate programs, and (iii) stu-dent attributes tend not to be perceived as developing from the usual process of an undergraduate education.
Future teachers are likely to teach as they were taught—which can be problematic, researchers wrote in a recent
study, "because most teachers experienced school mathematics as a set of disconnected facts and skills, not a
system of interrelated concepts."
But even when prospective teachers are taught to teach math conceptually, a good content knowledge base is still
important, the study found.
Several studies suggest that graduate students are at greater risk for mental health issues than those in the general population. This is largely due to social isolation, the often abstract nature of the work and feelings of inadequacy -- not to mention the slim tenure-track job market. But a new study in Nature Biotechnology warns, in no uncertain terms, of a mental health “crisis” in graduate education.
The exceptionally sad death of Malcolm Anderson at Cardiff Business School in February should serve as a warning light for universities in both the UK and further afield.
There is a high level of awareness and concern about student suicide, but it is important for every university leader, and perhaps every modern citizen, to realise that in most industrialised nations, including the UK, suicide is predominantly a risk among the middle-aged – and particularly among men in their late forties.
1. Public support to families with pre-school children can be in the form of cash benefits (e.g. child allowances) or of “in-kind” support (e.g. care services such as kindergartens). The mix of these support measures varies greatly across OECD countries, from a cash / in-kind composition of 10%/90% to 80%/20%. This paper imputes the value of services into an “extended” household income and compares the resulting distributive patterns and the redistributive effect of these two strands of family policies. On average, cash and in-kind transfers each constitute 7 – 8% of the incomes of families with young children. Both instruments are redistributive. Cash transfers reduce child poverty by one third, with the estimated impacts in Austria, Ireland, Sweden, Hungary and Finland performing above average. When services are accounted for, child poverty falls by one quarter and poverty among children enrolled in childcare is more than halved. This reduction is highest in Belgium, France, Hungary, Iceland and Sweden.